Fahrenheit 451 revisited (revised)

Since the Islamic State is currently among the limited roster of phenomena that the media follow, we are informed of this:

While the world was watching the Academy Awards ceremony, the people of Mosul were watching a different show. They were horrified to see ISIS members burn the Mosul public library. Among the many thousands of books it housed, more than 8,000 rare old books and manuscripts were burned.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/02/23/ISIS-Burns-8000-Rare-Books-and-Manuscripts-Mosul

Well, ISIL will do anything for attention;  naturally it was a public holocaust, not covert vandalism: compare the public book-burnings by the Nazis.   But what stands out is this lesser-known fact:

During the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the library was looted and destroyed by mobs. However, the people living nearby managed to save most of its collections and rich families bought back the stolen books and they were returned to the library.

Mobs, that weren’t even making any particular political point.  (They also looted and vandalized Iraqi museums.)  

A couple of years ago, during the Azawad adventure in Timbuktu, Salafist takfiris destroyed ancient books, mausoleums, and musical instruments.   And for centuries, the locals have looted archeological sites.

Prior to that, it was the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, repeatedly looted in the early 1990’s (before the U.S. came in).  Showing how little they cared, the Afghans went on to use what remained as a military base, which was duly rocketed and destroyed.

Subsequently, the collection is being replenished from holdings long faithfully curated in Switzerland and Germany, now donated.

Sculpture from Nineveh,
being taken to the British Museum for safekeeping

[Update 9 March 2015]   Fouad Laroui has just made the same point in his latest radio essay, “On touche le fond”: http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=6397555.  The depredations  of Da`ech "justifient, a posteriori, le pillage colonial".

[Footnote for the young.    The title of this post is a double allusion:  to Ray Bradbury’s novel, and to the Bob Dylan album Highway 51 Revisited.]

[Update]  For our viewing pleasure, Da`ish has followed this up with videos depicting their Art Critic Commandos smashing ancient statues with hammers and electric drills.
In a kind of scholarly pun, IS attackers both destroyed ancient Assyrian statues  from the days of Nineveh, and kidnapped hundreds of modern "Assyrian" Christians (no relation except the name) in Syria.

 Ancient Assyrian lamassu.

This one, at least, is safe in Chicago.

In recent years, there has been much squawking ex partibus infidelium (as well as from American indigenes) about Western preservation of their treasures, demanding the items’ return.   But nota bene:  It is only thanks to the labors of colonialists and scholars, that things like the Rosetta Stone, or  early Arabic manuscripts, or greenfield artefacts, have survived intact.

[Update, 5 Mar 2015]  They're still at it.  Bulldozers this time:
http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/irak-destruction-par-l-ei-des-ruines-assyriennes-de-nimroud-05-03-2015-1910422_24.php

~

A look back, to an earlier post about  the preservation of incunabula:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-cairo-geniza-re-seen.html

For more on Islamist destruction of antiquities -- and the very selective Western response:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-profanation.html

Further examples of bibliocide and historicide, from Muslim history.

Re the 8^th-century ruler al-Mahdi bi-'llah, and his suppression of the Persian-leaning dualists:

The Caliph Mahdi distinguished himself by an organised persecution of these enemies of the faith.  He appointed a Grand Inquisitor (Sâhibu l-Zanâdiqa … ) to discover and hunt them down.  If they would not recant when called upon, they were put to death and crucified, and their books were cut to pieces with knives.  Mahdi’s example was followed by Hâdi and Hârûn al-Rashid.

R.A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907)

In 850, the Caliph al-Mutawakkil destroyed the holiest site of Shiah pilgrimmage, the shrine of the martyr Hussein in Karbala.   Since that time, many other Shiite monuments have been attacked, down to our own day, becoming particularly vicious once Saddam Hussein was removed from power:  he had been a lid on a boiling kettle.

[Update 7 March 2015]  In other news, Satan has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/boko-haram-pledges-allegiance-to-isis-in-video-message-10093568.html

[Update 8 March 2015]  Another day, another atrocity.  This time it’s Hatra’s turn.

The actualités on Médi1 this morning  said that Da`esh was “en train de faire table rase du passé” -- to obliterate the past.

The phrase is striking, for it appears  quite unapologetically  in the anthem l’Intérnationale:

Du passé, faisons table rase,

foule esclave -- debout, debout !

Time was, that was intended to be the international anthem of the entire world (or what was left of it).

 

The French revolution as well  meant to scrape French discourse clean of some of its origins, going so far as to rename the names of the the days of the week, and of the months, with decimal (Primidi, Duodi) or descriptive equivalents (Frimaire, Nivôse) -- not to suppress the pagan reminiscences of the original names (for the Révolution was down on Christianity as well), but for a clean slate (with a decimal predilection). (Today, for example, is Decadi, 20 Pluviôse, l’an CCXXIII.  Many happy returns of the day.)

For the sans-culottes as for the Bolsheviks, the slogan might have been, not “nothing new under the sun”, but “nothing old under the sun”.   ISIL is not like that.  They are, indeed, laudatores temporis acti :  they wish only to destroy the non-Islamic past.

[Update 13 March 2015]  As mentioned, anti-Christian pograms have been raging in the Muslim world for years now, with little concern or even coverage in the West.  Just at present, however, a certain amount of attention is being paid to the latest wave of Christians fleeing Syria in the face of the ISIL advance -- but principally because they are a Christian minority -- the “Assyrians” -- and thus, like the Yazidis, have a certain novelty value for the sentimentalists.    They are fleeing into Lebanon -- years late, alas, since Lebanon has long since been overstuffed with refugees.  At this point,  all that influx is likely to spark yet another Lebanese civil war;   so at least Lebanese Christians will probably welcome the Assyrians, as constituting potential recruits for the coming confessional conflicts.

[Update 16 March 2015]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2997577/Replacing-Christian-crosses-black-flag-ISIS-Chilling-photographs-reveal-Islamic-State-thugs-ravaged-religious-sites-Nineveh.html

http://www.foxnews.com/world/slideshow/2015/03/16/isis-dark-mission-destroying-all-signs-christianity/

Home improvements

[Update 18 March 2015]  These guys just keep coming!

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2015/03/18/01003-20150318ARTFIG00475-attentat-en-tunisie-la-libye-voisine-est-devenue-l-epicentre-du-terrorisme.php

Some commentators, bemused that a museum was attacked, of all things, hypothesize that the real target was the Parliament building nearby.  But that makes no sense:  Nothing was preventing the attackers from assaulting that; instead, they chose to enter the museum.  And indeed, their target may well have been, in addition to the foreign tourists, the Roman antiquities themselves.

In fact, it may be germane that these are Roman antiquities.   For reasons best known to themselves, ISIL has repeatedly cited “Rome” as among the ultimate objects of their wrath.   What motivates this surprising attitude is surely eschatology and not politics, for Italy has been more than accomodating, bending over backwards (and dropping its drawers) to welcome hundreds -- or rather thousands -- of illegal (and in some proportion criminal) fugitives from North Africa -- fishing them out of their own African territorial waters  au besoin, and ferrying them to olde Italia.   By the time ISIL arrives in Saint Peter’s Square (their express objective), they may find that much of the work of cultural destruction has already been done.

~

In other news … The United States, in view of the mass destruction of antiquities in Iraq, has … shipped some more antiquities to Iraq, ones which had been safely curated here.   Such is the kneejerk of the sentimentalist;  you can kiss those items goodbye.

[Update, 7 Sept 2015]  Actually, if the Salafist iconoclasts would like to do something actually useful, there are gigantic icons  in the public squares of Paris and Versailles, that were more worthy of their axe:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/10/down-drain.html

[Update Jan 2016]  Historical precedents:

Re the Dark Ages following 2300 B.C. (during which, “In India, civilization itself  seems to have been extinguished”), re Mesopotamia:

By no means all temples were sacked. … Most temple libraries remained intact.

-- Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (1942, ³1964), p. 159

Hitler retaliated for the raid on Lübeck, sending German bombers against British cities with medieval town centres.  The raids were known as Baedeker raids, after the German guide books.

-- Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, vol. II (1998), p. 438

 ~

Cf. the Humean holocaust, with which he ends his celebrated Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1777):

If we take in hand any volume … let us ask, “Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?”  No.  “Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?”  No.  Commit it then to the flames:  for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Forbidden word of the day: “allochthone”

Our favorite radio essayist, M. Fouad Laroui, reports a strange story of linguistic politicization:  the banning, by Holland and Belgium, of the rather scholarly-looking and politically quite innocent word allochthone:

Un mot interdit

Now, allochthone is the antonym of autochthone, as you can tell by the prefixes, borrowed from Greek: allo- ‘other’, auto- ‘self, same’.  The root chthon- means ‘earth’ and appears in the learnèd English word chthonic.    Neither word is common in English, but autochthone is quite common in French.  Harrap’s defines it as ‘native’, and allochthone as ‘immigrant’.

Given its forbiddingly philological-Hellenistic hue, the word allochthone would seem as unlikely a target for political hysteria as, say, shibboleth or postlapsarian.   Yet such is the case today:  the word is legally banned;  anyone who uses it may be subject to punishment.

How did this come about?   As Laroui explains it,  the word itself is innocent enough but came to be soiled by the mouths that uttered it.   Just as, in America, the wingnuts came to use the term “liberal” (whose core meaning is something like ‘generous’) as a sneer-word, a hate-filled epithet, so the likes of Geert Wilders (of “scum villages” ill-fame) has used the Dutch version of allochthone invidiously, in his diatribes against immigrants.   And now -- just as they did in the “scum villages” affair -- the palladins of political correctitude have over-reacted and over-reached, with a tyranny that comes naturally to the self-righteous.

That the word is, von Hause aus, entirely blameless, can be seen in such passages as the following, picked almost at random:

Das Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP), eines der wichtigsten Beratungsorgane der niederländischen Regierung, hat am heutigen Tage eine Studie veröffentlicht, aus welcher hervorgeht, dass autochthone Niederländer von Zeitarbeitsfirmen bevorzugt werden. Während 28% der nicht-westlichen Allochthonen, die sich bei einer Zeitarbeitsfirma persönlich vorstellen, einen Job angeboten bekommen, liegt die Quote bei autochthonen Niederländern …

http://nlpolitik.wordpress.com/tag/allochthone/

Hmm… As an experiment, let us take a somewhat scholarly word, and see if we can similarly besmirch it:

“Donald Trump is nothing but a sniveling, low-down mercantilist !!!”

~

[Update 8 March 2015]  Fouad Laroui reports another editorialist’s call to suppress the use of a word:  in this case, islamophobie.   Docking a word, says Laroui, you cripple thought itself, “ce qui est propre de l’homme:   L’homme  nomme.”

“La pornographie de la banalité”

For reasons which our researchers are still trying to figure out (busy at work in the bustling bomb-proof underground laboratories beneath the WDC headquarters in Geneva), whenever I put up a post with “porn” in the title, the essay gets more hits than those with say, “ontology” or “monostich” or “Trinitarian minimalism”;  even though, in no case  is there the least hint of anything  that would bring a blush to a maiden’s cheek (though it might cause a Nominalist  to flush beet-red).   Go figure.

Anyhow:  I just listened to another delightful causerie by our favorite Franco-Maghrebo-Netherlandish radio journalist, al-sayyid Fouad Laroui.   In the course of a highly entertaining rant, he comes up with the phrase that headlines this note.  You can enjoy his perceptive artistry here:

     La tyrannie de la non-information

And for those lost souls who, slaves to their own libido, wound up at this page under the false hope that they might wind up beholding the considerable charms of, say Mlle. Aurélie Delvaux (which, en revanche, you may savor here and here), we offer this bagatelle as a consolation prize:

   Hotcha hotcha:  Dames, dames, dames !

 
.

Word of the Day: “téléréalité”

An acerbic essay on ‘reality shows’ in Holland, by my favorite Franco-Morocco-Dutch audiojournalist, Fouad Laroui:

   http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=6115198

As he notes, the genre was actually launched in the Netherlands in the first place.

Francophonic footnote to "What to call the ISIL"

[An update to our essay on How to talk about the ISIL, in particular the final section on how to badmouth it.]

In his entertainingly satirical French-language commentary,

   http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=6083548

Fouad Laroui (our favorite Franco-Morocco-Dutch radio feuilletoniste) comes up with a hit-parade (pronounced EET-pah-RAHD) of dysphemisms:  for the ISIL,  the “IS-no-good” (pronounced EEZ-no-GOOOD); for Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi (the Caliph Ibrahim, to those who acknowledge him as such), “EEZ-no-GOOOD sa-barbe-à-poux”; for the faux-caliphate, the “califarfelu”, for which the adjective is “califarfelutique”.

Additionally, he makes the same allusion to the HRE epigram that I did;  les beaux esprits se rencontrent.

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

[Update 18 September 2014]  And now this:

Les autorités françaises, fer de lance dans la guerre contre l'organisation de l'État islamique, ont officiellement adopté l’acronyme "Daech" pour désigner l’EI dans leurs discours officiels. Une décision qui n'a rien d'anodin.

http://www.france24.com/fr/20140916-daech-etat-islamique-EI-hollande-fabius-france/

*

Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péché irrémissible???

*

[Update 23 Sept]

I just heard le président Hollande refer to the ISIL.  He used the term that the French have officially decided on in order to irritate that group, namely Daech (we discuss all that here).  Only, oddly, he pronounced it as though it were spelled dache (monosyllabic, roughly like English dash).  It really should be disyllabic -- dâ`ish  (داعش )  -- mais soit, soit.  A la limite, cela sonne un peu comme “O la vache !”, “on crache”, la cravache, et cetera.  

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Update 26 September 2014]  

Bonjour les gars.   I do pay attention to the searchstrings which Blogspot stats kindly provides, indicating how people find this site, and what are their particular interests.  This just in:

how do the french pronounce isil

Alas, our googler must have been disappointed, since the French don’t use the term ISIL (nor ISIS) at all.   The only acronym they use is EI, which stands for état islamique, ‘Islamic state’.

Now, you will notice a little wedgie-thingie atop that “é”.  It is called an acute accent, or accent aigu,  and it causes the bare letter “e” -- which, in French, by itself is often no more than a low groan, or even (as e muet) quite silent --  to sharpen boldly, to something like the English long-a as in able or acatalectic or acategorematic or … or… well, no doubt you can come up with other examples yourselves.  So by rights, the French should pronounce EI as something close to English “aye-ee”.  But instead, what they say -- callously ignoring that acute accent -- is a sort of barely articulated “euh ee”, as though the term referred, not to a berserker band of heads-choppers-offers, but to some senior-citizen auxiliary to the Icelandic Stamp-Collector’s Pacifist Society. 

The other acronym used at present is what is etymologically acronymic in Arabic, but which is not perceived as such in French, and which is transcribed Daech -- which, if these cheese-eaters had any sense at all of the language whose European study was so nobly pioneered by the great Silvestre De Sacy in the 18^th century, would be pronounced disyllabically as   da-èche,  but which, in the mealy-mouth of President François Hollande, comes out as a mere monosyllable,  dache.

~

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Clothiers to gentlemen since 1917

~

[Update 2 October 2014]  Another problem, more troubling for French than for English, is what to call the new Algerian group which, in response to a call from Da`ish to kill “les sales français”, kidnapped Hervé Gourdel, and beheaded him.

We'll miss ya, buddy ...

The Arabic name is جند الخلافة;  in full phonetic transcription, Jund al-Khilafah fi Ard al-Jazaïr, or Jund al-Khilafah for short -- French name Soldats du califat.  The problem is, some French sources change this to Jund al-Khalifa -- “Army of the Caliph” vice “Army of the Caliphate”.   In this case, the practical difference is minimal;  but be aware of the difference.  Khilafah -- caliphate;  khalifah -- caliph.  (Note:  Both words are feminine in form, but the latter is masculine both grammatically and in reference.)

رمضان مبارك

We have often had occasion to praise the Moroccan-born radio-feulletoniste Fouad Laroui.  Here is the bio thumbnail provided by Medi1:

Depuis les Pays Bas, il nous offre chaque lundi sur Medi 1 le regard distancé, ironique, amusé ou caustique d’un maghrébin vivant en Europe du « Nord », et a pour cible la bêtise, la méchanceté et le fanatisme.

All that is true enough;  but he is not simply a satirist.  Here, he chronicles some quite intelligent and inventive innovations by Europe-based Muslims -- one taking into account history and northern latitudes, another observing Ramadan in what is effectively more a Lenten Christian spirit:

http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=6031585

Back of the Bus

Suppose that, in some country that vaunted itself on its record of human rights, in North America or Western Europe, there was a cardiac hospital whose waiting-list for heart-surgery numbered both black and white patients.   Now suppose that the hospital had -- not surreptitiously and shame-facedly, but quite openly and unabashedly, even as something to pride themselves on -- a hard-and-fast rule:  So soon as a white becomes a candidate for surgery, he automatically zooms ahead of all the blacks on the waiting list;  and so on forever.   Assuming that, as in most places, the demand for the surgical service always slightly outpaces the supply, the upshot is that no black could ever receive heart surgery.

This morning there appeared a radio essay by the Dutch-Moroccan academic and journalist Fouad Laroui, Je fume, donc je suis, reporting just such a case, in the north of ultra-bien-pensant Holland;  only, with one difference:   The group continually sent to the back of the bus  are not blacks, but smokers.

And such is the climate of political correctness there reigning, that the principal challenge to this invidious rule  has come, not from the quarter of general societal welfare and logic (shall such exclusions be applied, on the same grounds of ills abetted by personal behavior, to other risk groups, such as the obese or homosexual?),  but rather, from the ranks of Identity Politics themselves!  For the Turks resident in the Netherlands have -- not opposed the rule per se, but merely demanded that they themselves be excepted, as a group, on the grounds that, in their culture, smoking is not an individual choice, but an ethnic identity badge: Among Turks, a man wears a moustache, and smokes;  un-point-c’est-tout.

Laroui regularly reports on issues affecting Muslims in his current country of residence, les Pays-Bas;  and generally to defend them.   But in this case, he twits the Turkish case for absurdity, pointing out that it is a slippery slope down which other groups can be expected to snowboard, as some already had:  Muslim Somalis in Holland demanded group exemption from Dutch anti-narcotic laws, on the grounds that qât is part of their culture.   (Such an exemption was successful in the United States, in the case of Amerindians and peyote.)   He does not, however, take explicit exception to that hospital regulation itself;  perhaps deeming such comment superfluous in the case of so evidently overweening a rule, but perhaps not.

Word of the Day: «ultralaïcard» (bis)

[Again, a re-post, merely and purely to deprive the evil Web-bots of their landing-site, which now has been deleted.]

Headline in Le Figaro (Paris):

Le Pen prend la pose de «l'ultralaïcarde»

Marine Le Pen espère que la grande majorité des Français, devenus indifférents aux religions, ne lui tiendront pas rigueur de son idée d'interdir le voile ou la kippa dans la rue.

There is no word for this in English;  a good translation would be “supersecular”.   Even that will still not give the flavor, to Americans who have never lived with an established State religion.  

Marine Le Pen, who inherited the mantle of her father Jacques, is France’s most prominent …. what?  I was going to say “right-wing politician”, or perhaps ultraconservative, but again, in an American context, where those tendencies are associated largely with Christian evangelicals, her initiative will sound baffling.  For what she is proposing is to ban the wearing of a head-scarf or a yarmulke in the street.

Yes, you read that right.  Not making it up -- toleja, I’ve retired from satire, the world is just too weird.  A state ban on private citizens displaying religious symbols is the sort of bogeyman that keeps American conservatives up at night.

You picture the headlines:

Cops Nab Bar Mitzvah Boy

Bicycle chase through the crowded streets of Paris

In the context of Old World history, such a proposal is not as far-fetched as it sounds to us here.  Ataturk implimented much more drastic sumptuary laws when he took power in Turkey.

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

The readers’ comments upon this article  are not the sort of thing an American would expect;  I’ll quote a few of the most colorful.

La kippa est, malheureusement pour elle, le Cheval de Troie des communautaristes de toutes natures.

À choisir entre interdire la kippa et accepter les diverses sortes de cagoules, le choix est malheureusement clair:

Il faut interdire la kippa.

Ce serait d'ailleurs une interdiction toute provisoire:

La disparition de ce Cheval de Troie priverait de carburant une grande partie des jusqu'au-boutistes musulmans.

Ils se retrouveraient en slip, ou plutôt: en burkini.

--

Marine Le Pen a tout à fait raison, au grand dam de notre journaliste qui cherche à mettre les propos de MLP à tort. Elle n'a jamais interdit le port de la soutane, ou De la croix (qui font parti de notre patrimoine et de nos coutumes). Ce qu'elle veut dire surtout c'est qu'il faut arrêter ce communautarisme du à l'immigration musulmane qui mine notre pays et qui met en grave danger notre façon de vivre. Ces minorités sont constamment en conflit avec notre république et essayent de nous imposer leurs Us et coutumes

--

Ma fille est religieuse et je trouverais inadmissible qu'elle soit obligée de retirer son voile.
Et je préfère voir une femme musulmane avec son voile, qu'une autre qui montre ses fesses ou exhibe sa poitrine comme une prostituée.
Marine a poussé son bouchon laïcard un peu loin...

--

Le FN, parti laïque et franc-mac, c'est le monde à l'envers…

I won’t undertake to translate these;  culturally, they are untranslatable.

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

~

In the Netherlands, the most prominent right-wing anti-immigrant hardliner is the flamboyant bouffant-bottle-blond  Geert Wilders, -- digne héritier of Pym Fortuyn (who, however,  as badge and emblem of one knows not what subvariety of paraphilia, sported a shaved pate) -- whose most recent proposal for keeping the riff-raff in their place  is to flood Holland’s streets with police-dogs, since Muslims don’t like them:

Les chiens et la circoncision

http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5265759

(Actually, I know what it is like  to live like that, since when I was there as a graduate student, Berkeley was flooded with dogs:  only, it was the riff-raff themselves that brought them.)

That radio essay, by journalist Fouad Laroui, also touches upon the bizarre anti-circumcision campaign in Germany, likewise directed against the Other.  It all reads very strangely for an American of my generation:  in my age-cohort, babies were routinely circumcised.   My best friend for a while was a Norwegian-born boy, who felt quite weird and isolated, since he didn’t look like anyone else in the showers.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

[Encouraging update!] Two weeks later, M. Laroui offers another radioessay:

http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5278867

Turns out the Dutch are not that crazy.

~

For more wild ‘n’ wacky words, click here:  logophilia.

Pour davantage à propos de l’Hexagone, cliquez ici:  francophonie

La conjuration des imbéciles

Fouad Laroui has a witty and observant radio-essay on some recent meshugaas from Haarlem  (the double -aa- is accurate in both cases), which you can savor here:

http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5310972

A school was decorated with some calligraphy reminiscent of arabesque, though the letters were Latin. “C’est alors que la conjuration des imbéciles  se mit en branle.”  Right-wing xenophobes and “salafis analphabètes” (pour ne pas dire: analphabêtes)  sounded the alarm:  This was Arabic writing, was the (innaccurate) cry from both (otherwise interopposing) sides; and either vocally opposed it, though for opposite reasons.

What caught my attention was this detail:   When their linguistic error was pointed out, nobody slapped his forehead and said “My bad!”;  rather, they redoubled in vehemence, contriving further reasons for outrage.   And this is but too reminiscent of the scene in America these dark days, where (among others) the Birthers are simply outside the realm of logic, evidence, and rational discourse.

Abêtissement passif

We have  time and again  had occasion to link to the radio-essays of M. Fouad Laroui -- “écrivain marocain d’expression française”, as we say in the trade.   Here is his latest, on stultification (abaissement du niveau mental):

    http://medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5291930

The title puns on the phrase tabagisme passif -- “second-hand smoke” -- and might be translated “second-hand stupidity”.

He mostly squibs Internet niaiserie about celebs -- an easy, almost a lazy target.   But much the same occurs these days, whenever I hear Republicans spouting and expounding:  you can just feel the brain-cells, dying one by one …

On a more serious, even sombre note, concerning a deeper kind of abêtissement:

Living with "oligophrenia mathematica".

 

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

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La pornographie intellectuelle

Etant donné qu’il n’y a pratiquement plus d’intellectuels aux Etats-Unis, au sens sociologique et historique du terme -- nous avons bien plein de professeurs et de savants/ingénieurs, par contre -- tandis qu’aux pays de la francophonie, on comprend cela très bien, ce n’est pas la peine de diriger nos lecteurs anglophones (encore moins les monolingues) sur la dernière émission du signalé audiofeuilletoniste franco-maghrebi-néerlandais Fouad Laroui, au sujet de la trahison des clercs:  bien que nous ayons  souvent ici, pour eux, discuté de la fausse-haute vulgarisation dans des aires plus restreintes -- “physics porn”, “philosophy porn”, “neuroscience porn”, &c.    Or  notre camerade des ondes hertziennes virtuelles  nous offre une appréciation sévère de ceux qui, ayant publié tel entrefilet au Monde, ou certaine plaquette de poèmes, s’étendent sur les grands problèmes techniques de notre planète,  à coups de “Y’a que….”  (Chez nous, en panne d’intellectuels, ce sont les stars de Hollywood qui s’adressent à ces besoins.)

Donc, écoutez, réfléchissez:

L'intellectuel

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Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Update 15 January 2012]

Jemand ist eben jetzt in dieser Weise hierher gekommen:

        porno fuer intellectuelle

Sie irren sich, mein Herr!

In other words, someone googled a German phrase meaning “pornography for intellectuels” (by morphological accident, the feminine singular adjective in French is a homograph of the plural noun in German), thus misunderstanding the semantics of the title of this post.

So, a lexical clarification for our foreign visitors:

Beginning some decades ago, the term “sexy” in academic/public-policy contexts came to refer to disciplines and research areas that were attracting young talent and getting grants.   The term quickly lost any connotations of actual sex.

Less widespread, though extant, and frequent on this site, is the use of the term “pornography” to denote tawdry populist exploitations of serious subjects in the middlebrow media.   As this site has no interest whatsoever in pornography in its literal sense (other than to advise:  Avoid it; marry, and be faithful to your spouse), the term is here always used in this sense of intellectual and social criticism.